FP Culture – Crossfit: The Bastardization of Functional Training

The written portion of this article is directed to the Huffington Post article asking Crossfit haters to give a little more constructive criticism. In that post, we happened to see the same old route people take in addressing naysayers. Problem I have with the naysayers is that they are not going far enough. We will keep things short and sweet.

11 Comments

I try to incorporate FP within my Crossfit. A lot of the KB workouts / warmups you provide. I am open minded within fitness but it drives me nut to hear the bashing. I will continue to follow but this is almost High Schoolish! How about trying to come together with Greg Glassman and sitting down and trying to enhance both venues of fitness! Just an idea.

I agree Crossfit need to operate in more than just the sagittal plane. But hating on Crossfit to market your work is kind of lame. I enjoy your work but I also like a lot of things about Crossfit. The sheep picture is going a bit to far and makes you look a bit cheesy a spiteful. Your better served when you keep it about the science.

I’ll prefice this by saying I’m not a CrossFit junky, I’m a weight lifter who just dables in CrossFit movements occasionally (by that I mean kettle bell work, gymnastics, ect.)

I do agree CrossFit does a lot in the saggital plane, but it’s not their fault that a running a race backwards wouldn’t exactly be foolproof.

You guys however need to actually try deadlifting more than a six pounded medicine ball before you can try to say CrossFit doesn’t use your TVA. Lifting heavy weight over the front of your center of gravity is extremely stressful on your core stabilizers, and that’s just deadlifts! I’ll give you my left arm if you can find an Olympic weight lifter with poor core strength. You arrogant douchebags think holding your bodyweight over your head doesn’t use your core stabilizers!?

My second argument is quite simple. Functional movements are movements that have a FUNCTION, and every single movement has a function or you wouldn’t be able to do it. So I can skip past arm curls (even though I’m just going to say if you’ve ever carried 2x4s in front of you, you’ll know that arm curls are actually “functional” as well), but at the very least any time you lift weight off the floor, it’s functional! Do you never pick anything up off the ground? And when do you do, do you think it’s not functional? Do you come up to your backpack backwards to get out of the saggital plane and then swing it around you twice to activate your TVA to call it functional?

Your big words don’t fool everyone, CrossFit isn’t the perfect sport but there is no such thing as a perfect sport so stop thinking that’s what CrossFit’s goal is.

I really love all your videos. I purchased the official FP workout system and it’s absolutely great. I agreed with with everything that you guys were saying about crossfit until I saw I guy on 60minutes sports yesterday that has devioted his life to pain free movement. He’s talks about the exact things that you guys do. Then I found out he’s a crossfit expert as well. Which made me agree with and earlier post. There’s good and bad in everything. Perhaps you guys need to get together for the good of all. Fight back and forth doesn’t really help.